«Civilization has arisen out of play by some evolutionary process, in the sense that somethingwhich was originally play passed into something which was no longer play and could henceforth becalled culture. [...] Social life is endued with supra-biological forms, in the shape of play, whichenhance its value. It is through this playing that society expresses its interpretation of life and theworld. By this we do not mean that play turns into culture, rather that in its earliest phases culturehas the play.character, that it proceeds in the shape and the mood of play.» 70 years after thepublication of the Italian edition of Homo ludens by Johan Huizinga, with his vision of westerncivilization sub specie ludi, the subject of the game as mirror of the functioning of a society is isonce again the object of study, including research on the Middle Ages, as witnessed, inter alia, bythe long series of recent monographs or international collected works of games studies on sports,entertainments and pastimes in the Middle Ages, as well as by the Italian journal Ludica and theinitiatives of the Venice research group. The presence of playful forms in specific societies andcultures of the Early Middle Ages - and, therefore, in its historical, literary, artistic andarchaeological forms - has remained, however, an almost uncharted territory and the attempt to fillthis gap is for CISAM an important opportunity of historiographical innovation and intellectualexploration. For this reason the Scientific Board of the Foundation has decided to devote the LXVWeek of Studies (2017) to research on this subject in its different meanings, which reflect the scopeof Huizinga's book, adjusting it to the tradition and to the chronological framework typical ofCISAM: definition of the cultural categories relating to play; history of the transmission of playfrom Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages; analysis of the social functions of play and the rules andregulations referable to it, including the reading of liturgical or procedural rites as playfulmechanisms; explorations of archaeological evidence and of historical-artistic and numismaticrepresentations (focusing in particular on the diffusion of dice and chess); the public display andpolitical function of ludi in urban or war contexts and the analysis of hunting as a society game; theuse of playful systems in the teaching of the different European and extra-European areas; themechanisms and effects of literature; the terminology of play in the early medieval languages. Thehope of the proposed program is that this meeting should become an occasion for importantacquisitions and a relaunching of research into the dynamics of play, representing a fundamentalanthropological connection between early medieval society and modern society, one that has beenrelatively ignored till now.